ENTERTAINMENT
ENTERTAINMENT THROUGHOUT this series of discussions of the purpose and the meaning of fiction I have had a great deal to say about such things as the author's attitude toward his work, the status of fiction in this generation and that, and the general evolution of the novel upward; but I have taken hardly any notice of the corresponding changes which must have occurred in the reader of fiction, if the novel has achieved anything of its real purpose. I have dealt with the more and more truth, the higher and higher kind of truth, which the novelist is always putting into his writing: now let me deal with the amount and kind of truth which the reader must, in justice, get out of his reading. We have seen, if my account has attained any coherence, that the evolution of the novel has been an affair of struggle between opposed forces, and that the struggle has constantly been shifted to a higher and higher plane, every bit of ground won representing a new ideal for the shape or the spirit of the novel, or for both. First came the struggle between the method of extravagant fancy and the method of realism of circumstance; and the novel won truth to fact. Then came the struggle between satire and the scientific attitude; and the novel achieved its present realism of spirit, its truth to the nature of things. The whole trend throughout these stages is from irresponsibility toward responsibility, or, as I said, from a lower and more personal conception of truth to a higher and more impersonal. Now, it is my present point that this brief history of what has happened to the novel is also a brief implied history of what must have happened to the reader. If we leave out the baser demands of the commercial market, which always remain about the same except for superficial vogues, and which almost automatically create the supplies they desire, it remains pretty true—at least truer than in almost any other kind of transaction—that the supply of fiction creates the demand. The novelist not only serves his public: to a large extent he makes it, and makes it after his own kind. And it seems on the whole a true generalization that the less responsible fiction of the time, roughly, before 1860 sought and found a less responsible reader, the more responsible fiction since that time a more responsible reader. We know that only within forty years or thereabout has the reading of fiction become completely respectable ; and that means that the aim of the novel has become elevated, which means in turn that it finds its mark in a better and better part of the reading population. The sort of person who read history, biography, and memoirs a half century ago, and by no means novels, reads novels now as a quite natural recourse. I am not at this moment debating whether the change is good for him : but it is certainly a good thing for the novel, and indicative of its gradual self-improvement, that the reader who had nothing to do with it in the last generation could hardly do without it in this. The change means, to put it shortly, that once upon a time the truth-loving person read fiction, if at all, without reference to his love of truth, in order to forget, to take "a moral holiday, " to be "taken out of himself"; whereas now he can read fiction precisely to intensify and reward his love of truth, however exacting that may be. Fiction once offered, principally, amusement or diversion through escape from responsibility; now it offers, at least the best of it does, the pleasure of responsibility understood, accepted, and welcomed. Naturally I do not mean that the great novelists of the past failed on the whole to tell truth, or that their readers failed to find truth in them. A great artist is, almost by definition, a person who sees that on the whole truth is more entertaining than falsification. But they worked, those great novelists, quite frankly under the ideal of entertainment, as we see by the places where their work does not ring true. Those are invariably the places where they thought they saw a clash between truth to human nature and diversion for the reader. Where they thought a pretty lie would please the reader better than the restraint of sober verity, there is no conflict at all—they tell the pretty lie. Whereas now they would tell the sober verity; and the reader—this is the important point of difference—would accept it as conveying more and better pleasure than the pretty lie. The modern reader who is worth writing for does not readily pardon his realist for turning sentimentalist. This change in the novel-writer, and in the reader's requirement, was expressed inimitably by Mr. Howells a quarter of a century ago in some passages about the tradition of the holiday story as written by Dickens and others. There is no doubting the genuineness of Dickens's literary conscience, judging it by the highest standards extant in his time: yet any common reader of 1918 can see the tinsel in what Dickens's public took for gold. Says Mr. Howells, after noting that it was Dickens who "rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all": "Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this later day—The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth, and all the rest— and with 'a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, ' asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horse- play; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped ; the psychology commonplace; the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest ; the people often speak the language of life, but their motives are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people. " And again, in droll and specific irony on some particular ingredients of the Christmas tradition in stories:— ". . . the Christmas season is meteorologically . . . favorable to the effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, denser, and colder nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner of signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for the active intervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lasting change in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, and grasping habits of a life-time, and reconciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted them in marriage; or softening them to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; and generally disposing them to a distribution of hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly reception of chubby gentlemen with charity subscription papers. Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer exciting difficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather thickly round the steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them preparatory to their discovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather is also very suitable to encounter with murderers and burglars; and the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer indoors promotes the gaieties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in love and marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be so available for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helping the author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious-looking entertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out ; or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them. We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season for anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, or the Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile ; there is no time so good for the use of this material ; and ghosts on shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own logging camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and- is moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the mining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, and breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from heaven ; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of their revolvers. "' This material and this spirit hardly please the least critical of us now. Do not such facts prove that the conscience of art has changed for the better, and with it the conscience of the reader, and that both have become more like the conscience of ordinary self- respecting intercourse? II "Intercourse" is, I think, a happy word for the newer relation between the writer of stories and his public—especially if one recall the high sense given that word by Stevenson in his essay on "Truth of Intercourse. " We conceive the artist as a fellow- citizen with the gift of profitable utterance, instead of as a hired public performer for hours of relaxation. We elevate him, in short, to the rank of a fellow- worker. It is perhaps worthwhile to note that this new attitude, which gives the artist a more natural place among us and stresses his likeness to ourselves instead of his differences, is a return part way to what must have been the original idea of his function. The primitive artist was a spokesman of many, their voice and expression; his task it was to interpret them to themselves, as they drew together for battle or celebration, mourning or festival. He was the cornposite consciousness of the people given an articulate voice. When national or racial unity declined, his function became non-integral; and his continued existence became dependent on the favor of some individual patron who supported him. In the second stage the artist was owned by an individual, as a sort of rare exhibit whose existence conferred distinction on the owner. About the time of Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous declaration of independence, this long stage of patronage and fulsome dedications gave way to a third, much more difficult to describe, much more tenable for a self- respecting workman, but still of limited and imperfect dignity. In this third stage the relation of patronage continued, only the whole book-buying public took the place of the individual benefactor. This conjoint ownership of a writer by a whole people—one sees it in the mid-Victorian English attitude toward Dickens—involves the idea that the artist is a queer being with an incomprehensible knack of giving people something they want; an amazing prodigy of nature whom the public takes pride in owning and exhibiting, but whom it does not feel in the least obliged to understand provided it pays him, and whom it would not greatly care to resemble. The artist of this period is like a freak in a circus, whom people pay to stare at, or like an expensive entertainer who can be "had in" for the evening, but whom no one would dream of having as a guest. To a certain extent it is true that we are still in this third stage; one sees a relic of it in the popular feeling that an author must continue to emulate his first successes. We felt abused and taken advantage of when the late William De Morgan, who had pleased us with four striking novels in what we chose to call "his own vein, " suddenly betrayed us into buying his fifth novel, An Affair of Dishonor, written in an entirely different vein ; we begrudged him his technical and legal right to be something more or something less than himself, to be the Tart of himself that we were not paying for. But, despite this instinctive tyranny of the public toward authors who have identified themselves with a particular sort of fiction, —or, as we put it in our crude commercial vernacular, a particular "line of goods, "—one sees some hopeful . signs of a fourth stage, more like the first, in which the artist shall be a self-respecting fellow-worker with the rest of us, judged by the much or little value of his intercourse with us, and willing, since it is necessary, to take the pay that comes from the social value of his work. This view of the artist, the only one which brings truth of intercourse to the front, is of course a product of our socialized view of everything. It is bound to be given an enormous impetus in a time like this, when unity of conscience is so quickened and intensified among great masses of men; for at such times, not only does the artist express what we want, interpret us to ourselves, and read for us the meaning of life and struggle and death better than the politician or the inarticulate soldier can do, but he also dies for us and with us. The young poets whose names this war has added to the roll made illustrious by Sir Philip Sidney have done something for the place of the artist in our civilization; and Rupert Brooke buried in foreign soil on the hilltop of his , Egan isle is perhaps doing as much for the reader of the future as Rupert Brooke writing: "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. " Hardly ever again, after the artist has shown himself as real in his living and dying as in his writing, can we go back to the patronizing system which sets him apart as a matink idol—an impersonator and not a person. III All this change of attitude is the flat rejection of art as diversion merely, of art for escape. What we must ban and debar and obliterate is the wholly false notion that life and literature are two largely separate things that have least to do with each other. The man who writes a book. is living most fully while he does it; it is a wholly false classification that says he is dealing in life at second-hand, while the man who penetrates the Arctic Circle or the sources of the Amazon is dealing in it at first-hand. A story is probably not worth writing unless it represents the writer's closest contact with living reality ; and it is certainly not worth reading if it merely takes the reader divertingly "out of himself. " We speak of "the world of books. " It seems to me an unconsciously cynical phrase, a tacit sneer—as though reading a book were an interlude in living, a gap in reality, while travelling seventy miles an hour or over-eating rich foods were "real"! A worthy book was written by somebody who was living more fully when he wrote it than nine-tenths of us ever live; and if we cannot read it in fullness of life, if we read it because we have "nothing to do, " then, heaven help us, we are doddering in the wrong generation. What, then, is meant by the saying that "The purpose of all art is to give pleasure?" Why, simply that we must give "pleasure" a large enough definition. We must make it mean the pleasure of the right person, and the right person taken at the right time. Mr. Brownell speaks ' of the readers who rest the whole justification of Edgar Allan Poe on his success in making their flesh creep. Doesn't he make one's flesh creep? they ask. Well, says Mr. Brownell, that depends entirely on whose flesh they are referring to. There are all sorts of pleasures ; and the sort of person who reacts decisively to the best is ordinarily left untouched by the less good. Sociologically, we are all agreed that the highest pleasures are not those which "take us out of ourselves, " but those which take us more deeply into ourselves and into each other ; not those which make us forget, but those which quicken and inspire remembrance. In other words, the highest pleasures are the social emotions which come from a rational and truthful view of our status as fellow mortals—pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, fraternity, solidarity; the pleasures of "truth of intercourse. " It is well to remind ourselves that the highest development of civilization is two or three men sitting in a room talking. This sense of community on which the great joys depend is recognized in all great art, and especially in the moral compensations of great tragedy. The social emotions of which I am speaking may often be merged with pain : Everyone of them demands at least a person with the capacity for generous pain. Most of them are compound of pain and pleasure. Pater speaks of "living at the point where all the highest sensations meet"; the fully pleasured life is what it is because the pleasure is full, not because the pleasure is all of one kind. Any sort of self-discipline or renunciation converts a lower pleasure into a higher. The prototype of all such truisms is in David's words, "Can I drink the blood of my friends?" as he pours the water on the ground, renouncing a sensual pleasure for a spiritual ; or in the words of a greater than David, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. " And—if I may be trivial again after being perhaps unduly serious—it is quite as true that the person who renounces the reading of silly books, or the reading of serious books in a silly frame of mind, is renouncing a low pleasure of self- gratification for a higher pleasure of self-development, and getting rid of a chocolate-cream philosophy for the sake of a sense of what life is really made of—which is the thing that real books are made of too. IV Of course no one means to deny fiction a reasonable self-indulgence in the matter of moral holidays. The Pipe-Smoker in one of Mr. Kenneth Grahame 'a Pagan Papers speaks of cigarettes as being all very well "when you're not smoking"; and books there be too, ranging from those of Thomas Love Peacock to those of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, which are all very well when you're not reading. Every member of Everyone of the learned professions, and all writers and lecturers especially, must have many intervals of looking forward with intense relish to the blessed relief of having for a time no opinions to express, or even to hold ; and it is a notorious fact that every teacher of the young spends the month of May reviling his occupation and threatening to buy a farm. Was it Belfast in The Nigger of the "Narcissus" who, in the revulsion of feeling produced by such an accumulation of hardships as was the lot of seamen in ships that sailed, threatened to "chuck going to sea forever and go in a steamer"? Anything, done hard enough and long enough, proves the advantage of doing it no more for a season, and of doing anything else whatever ; but the implicit meaning of all vacations is that temporary irresponsibility is one kind of preparation for being permanently responsible. It is work that gives a vacation all the meaning it can ever have. And the literature of pure diversion, likewise, derives its sense from its relation to the literature of interpretation. We read the literature of escape—often with a feeling that the function of the mere entertainer is in some sort a sacred one, a ministry—precisely because of everything that it is not ; thus tacitly admitting that it is an exception and not the norm. A book from which I have already quoted, Criticism and Fiction, puts the concession to irresponsibility into terms partly historical when it says: "I am not saying that what may be called the fantastic romance —the romance that descends from Frankenstein rather than The Scarlet Letter—ought not to be. On the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where men actually sin, suffer, and die. "' Note, though, how Mr. Howells goes on: "But it belongs to the decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the imagination—the works that represent and body forth human experience. Its ingenuity can always afford a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuable truth. " 1 It is the higher of these two implied kinds of pleasure that art must more and more steadfastly hold for its ideal. To be art at all, it must of course minister to pleasure; but there always remains the difference between getting out of life to seek pleasure and seeking to bring pleasure into life. One of the most distinguished surgeons in America, and at eighty years one of the hardest-working men, objects to the theoretically ideal day of eight hours to work, eight to play, and eight to sleep, on the ground that himself requires at least sixteen hours to play. No one supposes that work of any kind is all beer and skittles; at least no one does who has worked; and some there are who make a sad and laborious business even of doing nothing at all. But work must be done, somehow, on a basis of indomitable joy in it, and as our only possible means of self-expression in terms of life. And so must be done the work of the novelist. It is one of the distressing anomalies of the writer's life, and in fact one of the chief drawbacks to it, that the work which he does with joy is not received by the public, whatever the joy it gives them, as work. The sober business of his life is the exception, the interlude, in theirs. The irony and the incongruity of this clash between the purpose of fiction and its meaning are expressed by a gifted contemporary writer in these terms : "The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishments of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every moment of every living American's existence ; whereas had America produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most have caused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings rather differently. " Such a consideration is felt as belittling; even a writer who affects to despise the public which gives him his living must feel its interference with a kind of plain human dignity which we all like to have. It is a much more serious consideration than that raised by Stevenson in his famous "Letter to a Young Gentleman Proposing to Embrace the Career of Art. " To win one's living by pleasure given to others is indeed a difficult sentence to accept, unless one have illimitable faith in the quality and the effectual value of the pleasure. But even the professional athlete is better off, in this one respect, than the professional story-teller: at least, what his public accepts from him is the same thing which he is paid to offer, and such dignity as he has does not suffer the affront of seeing his work daily misconstrued, taken for something else altogether. The general acceptance of fiction as a part of real life is a high and remote possibility, not an impossibility; and its very remoteness is a reinforcement of every reason why the novelist must hope and strive for it. There can certainly be no hope of a public better than the artist himself conceives and works for; and, as a fact, the changes already produced in the reader by the writer's greater and greater demands upon him are noteworthy enough to justify the hope that in this fundamental matter also the artist can, by being creative enough, make whatever kind of reader he needs. For example: Time was when work did not enter into the subject- matter of fiction. The characters lived exclusively to make the story; and if they were not leisured folk, then they were working folk taken in their hours of leisure. But for a generation past, the novel, except as written by Henry James, has dealt with busy folk in their hours of busyness. Its characters, instead of existing to live the story that the novelist wants to tell, require him to write the story about them because they are really living. This one change in the make-up of fiction shows how our conception of pleasure has changed, from escape to voluntary self-immersion in the affairs of our fellows. And if this change could come about in our attitude toward the work about which the novelist writes, why can it not come about in our attitude toward the work which he himself does? All art looks forward, consciously or unconsciously, to the breaking-down of the distinctions between work and play through the elevation of play to the worth and the usefulness of labor. While we work and play separately, the artist is bound to remain a person of inferior dignity ; but he saves his self- respect by working tacitly for a public, hitherto almost undreamed- of save by a few, which shall live the whole, the integral, life—that is, which shall wholly and exhaustively live all the time, and in which everything that is suffered to exist at all shall be both desirable and indispensable, both play and work. In that life of the future, blessedly free from the shallow distinctions between the things we do because we have to and those we do because we want to, the arts can really come into their inheritance. Perhaps this is only to say that there will never be any adequate appreciation of the fine art of telling tales until a great part of mankind has learned to make a fine art of living. V There is one corollary of taking fiction on such terms, as an incessant ministration to living reality, which for my part I find it not difficult to accept— the deadness at this moment of the once living works which we reprint and study and call "classics. " To begin with, most of them were produced under a pretty shallow definition of pleasure; and they have therefore nothing to say to our higher ideal unless they far exceeded the utmost implications of their lower one. Only one thing could save fiction inspired by the older ideal: enough scope of vision in the artist to see the picture of our common human nature as it is forever, whatever becomes of its momentary conditions. Shakespeare, Fielding, Jane A'ustenthese, and very few others in English, live by their creation of something true that cannot change. But the lesser folk who had not this vision—do they transmit to us any real message? The only other possible achievement is the timely record of movements, tendencies, beliefs, phases of civilization—facts, the material of the lesser and lower realism. And the appeal of these is necessarily impermanent just in proportion as it is timely and intense. The least inspired realist, if he have conscience, patience, and clear eye-sight, can show us in one book more about our own decade than all the Maria Edgeworths and Harriet Martineaus and Charles Kingsleys in literature can teach us about it in all their books put together; and unless he have something of eternity in his pages, in another decade his work will be as dead as most of theirs. And why should we not be glad to let him have his hour of life in his work? Recognizing or not recognizing its mortality, we can afford to be glad of whatever vitality it has in its own time, and consent to let posterity read for itself as we read for ourselves. By the same logic, why should we let antiquity read for us? A book is dead when it fails to speak fruitfully to us, either of things which are everlasting, or of things which are pressing and imperative parts of our lives now. I do not see why we should reject books which do the second thing merely on the ground that they will be meaningless to the future : that fact proves only the livingness of life. Neither do I see why we should go out of our ways to know and to preserve books merely because they meant something once. Either attitude implies a veneration for art as something apart from life—a disjunction the passing of which this book partly records and partly predicts. Most novels treat, in one way or another, a single constantly recurring situation : that of individual wealth or power in its relations with the rest of mankind. Underlying this theme, and every theme, is human nature. If in treating the theme the novelist can reveal true human nature as it has never been revealed before in a similar connection, he has done the greatest and the only permanent thing. If, failing to do that, he reveals an important phase of our present commercial civilization, he has done the next greatest. His novel is pretty certain of oblivion; but why should we pretend that it does not say more to us than some nineteenth- century novel that makes us laugh or cry, or sleep, over the fortunes of heroes and heroines whose concerns are none of ours, except through the vainest and most belittling kind of curiosity—the instinct of gossip, pure and simple? Nothing could have a more satisfying effect on art than a ruthless sacrifice of whatever is superstitious in our veneration for the writings of the past. Meredith points, for the artist, the way to a noble disregard of all but living realities when he disclaims every thought, every desire, of immortality except on the score of service rendered : ". . . all right use of life, and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us; as to my works, I know them faulty, think them of worth only when they point and aid to that end. " Art is a living thing to him who makes it: unless it be so to the rest of us, have we really accepted it at all? And while the artist of the present is content to die as soon as his handiwork means nothing to us, is it not strange that we should occupy ourselves with conferring a fictitious life upon dead artists of the past, and, as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh once said, pin bits of colored ribbon on each other for having the intelligence to understand their works? I end, because I can do no better, with this eloquent account 1 of the relation between writer and reader, by a novelist whose work was beginning just as Meredith's was ending ; an account contained in an early Preface which, however often quoted of late, is not likely ever to become more familiar than it deserves: "Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a laborer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape ; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget. "And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim—the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult—obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult. "To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold !—all the truth of life. is there : a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest. " Category:Emotional qualities of a story